Level Set Teleportation: An Optimization Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mishkin, Aaron, Bietti, Alberto, Gower, Robert M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mishkin, Aaron
Bietti, Alberto
Gower, Robert M.
author_facet Mishkin, Aaron
Bietti, Alberto
Gower, Robert M.
contents We study level set teleportation, an optimization routine which tries to accelerate gradient descent (GD) by maximizing the gradient norm over a level set of the objective. While teleportation intuitively speeds-up GD via bigger steps, current work lacks convergence theory for convex functions, guarantees for solving the teleportation operator, and even clear empirical evidence showing this acceleration. We resolve these open questions. For convex functions satisfying Hessian stability, we prove that GD with teleportation obtains a combined sub-linear/linear convergence rate which is strictly faster than GD when the optimality gap is small. This is in sharp contrast to the standard (strongly) convex setting, where teleportation neither improves nor worsens convergence. To evaluate teleportation in practice, we develop a projected-gradient method requiring only Hessian-vector products. We use this to show that gradient methods with access to a teleportation oracle out-perform their standard versions on a variety of problems. We also find that GD with teleportation is faster than truncated Newton methods, particularly for non-convex optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_03362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Level Set Teleportation: An Optimization Perspective
Mishkin, Aaron
Bietti, Alberto
Gower, Robert M.
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
We study level set teleportation, an optimization routine which tries to accelerate gradient descent (GD) by maximizing the gradient norm over a level set of the objective. While teleportation intuitively speeds-up GD via bigger steps, current work lacks convergence theory for convex functions, guarantees for solving the teleportation operator, and even clear empirical evidence showing this acceleration. We resolve these open questions. For convex functions satisfying Hessian stability, we prove that GD with teleportation obtains a combined sub-linear/linear convergence rate which is strictly faster than GD when the optimality gap is small. This is in sharp contrast to the standard (strongly) convex setting, where teleportation neither improves nor worsens convergence. To evaluate teleportation in practice, we develop a projected-gradient method requiring only Hessian-vector products. We use this to show that gradient methods with access to a teleportation oracle out-perform their standard versions on a variety of problems. We also find that GD with teleportation is faster than truncated Newton methods, particularly for non-convex optimization.
title Level Set Teleportation: An Optimization Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03362